


永远爱你是我说过

by 10cm



Category: Infinite (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 12:36:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3120386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/10cm/pseuds/10cm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(i promised that i would love you forever.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> paradise music video au.

sunggyu finds the house by chance, really. he and myungsu are trampling leaves in a forest looking for who knows what, and they stumble across it by accident. white clapboard, yellow trim, paint peeling from the walls. it looks like a set for one of the horror films that dongwoo’s so fond of lately, the ones that give sunggyu nightmares. it’s haunting, like only abandoned buildings can be. sunggyu shivers.

“did you know this was here?” myungsu asks.

“no,” sunggyu says.

“should we go in?” myungsu likes adventure. usually, sunggyu does too.

“what if it’s haunted?”

“come on, hyung,” myungsu says. he’s already halfway up the walk, head tilted back so he can get a look at the third-floor windows. the glass is broken out. behind the sharp fragments, sunggyu can see curtains. it’s unnerving, how normal it all seems. “you don’t really believe in ghosts, right?”

(incidentally, sunggyu kind of does. has ever since he was a child and he was woken up in the middle of the night to hear his grandmother singing him a lullaby, only to be informed the next morning that his grandmother had passed away during the night).

“do i believe in ghosts.” famous last words, sunggyu thinks, and follows.

the house is locked, but the bolt is rusted and gives easily enough when myungsu leans his shoulder against the frame. “isn’t this breaking and entering?” sunggyu asks, delicately brushing dust off of his sleeve from where he’s made contact with a wall. the dust must be an inch thick. sunggyu tries very studiously not to think about the potential for structural instabilities. “if we get arrested, myungsu-yah, i swear...”

“if you didn’t know this place was here, i don’t think anybody else will, either,” myungsu says. he looks excited. most of the time (now included), sunggyu wishes that this sort of thing wasn’t such a rush for him. “let’s look around, hyung. you go upstairs and i’ll look down here.”

the stairs hold (thank god), but the upstairs is just as empty as the downstairs. sunggyu nudges a couple of doors open, looks at broken mirrors and porcelain fragments from where the toilets were removed. in one room, there’s a small plastic box on the floor, a name written on the top in hangeul so scrawled sunggyu can’t even make it out. the problem, he thinks, with places like these is that they seem like anachronisms. even uninhabited for years, there’s a feeling like they moved out only yesterday.

sunggyu crouches and runs a finger along the lid of the box. it’s probably empty, he thinks. probably something that got left behind when the last inhabitants left, but that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? anything left behind always is. sunggyu thinks about the owner of this box and whether or not they realized it was gone, thinks about how sad they must have been. this house feels sad.

the hair on the back of his neck prickles. from where he’s kneeling on the floor of the room, looking at the box, sunggyu sees someone shift out of the corner of his eye.

“holy fuck,” he swears, and then claps a hand over his mouth. “i mean. myungsu? don’t scare me like that.”

from the hallway: silence. sunggyu’s heart thuds in his ears.

“myungsu?” he says again, straightening up and sticking his head out into the hallway. it’s empty, except for a few dust bunnies and bits of plaster scattered on the floor. remnants. “this isn’t funny anymore, myungsu.”

“hyung?” myungsu’s voice seems very far away. “hyung, are you talking to me?”

“where are you?”

“down here.” myungsu takes a few steps up the stairs, looking through the railing at sunggyu. “did you find anything cool? downstairs is kind of a bust.”

“not really,” sunggyu says. “just some leftover junk from whoever lived here last.”

myungsu looks disappointed. “what a bust, i was really hoping this would be cool. are you gonna come down?”

“sure, i just wanna check one more thing,” sunggyu says, and myungsu nods and disappears back down the stairs. slowly, halfway expecting something awful, sunggyu takes a step or two back into the room he’d left. the box is still there, the room is still empty, but the air is heavy (or maybe that’s just sunggyu’s trepidation). it’s very still. even the dust motes visible in the pale sunlight from the window seem to be moving in slow motion.

“hey,” sunggyu says. “sorry about, you know, coming into your territory. we were just curious.”

nothing responds. of course nothing responds, sunggyu thinks. he shakes his head at himself and takes the stairs two at a time to meet myungsu at the door.

 

but three days later he’s back.

it’s strange, but sunggyu hasn’t stopped thinking about the house, about the box, about that feeling of stillness and silence that had been soaked into the very molecules of the air inside. he’d even gone to the library and asked about historical records. “that house out in the woods near namgo-san,” he explained, leaning his elbows on the counter and trying not to seem to interested. “i want to know who lived there last.”

there hadn’t been much, just a few articles about planned demolition and repurposing of the space. sunggyu was disappointed, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

the second time around, the house is still in disrepair, and sunggyu is still nervous. but at least this time he knows what he’s doing, sort of. he takes the stairs two at a time, up, and stops in front of the partially-closed door to the room he’d seen last time. when he and myungsu left, he’d left the door open. sunggyu wonders how many other people know about this place.

he toes the door open, but the box isn’t there, and the air is much clearer than it had been before.

“did someone take it?” he wonders aloud to himself, walking a slow circle around the room to look in each corner, just in case he’d missed it. the sound of his voice is too loud in the stillness of the house, but it unsettles him, this absence. it weighs on him. “that must be why the door was closed.”

a floorboard creaks under sunggyu’s pacing feet and he nearly jumps out of his skin. “kim sunggyu,” he scolds himself, when his heart rate has calmed a little. “don’t be ridiculous.”

he turns around and almost jumps out of his skin again when he sees the box sitting not two feet away.

“oh, man,” he says, taking one, then two cautious steps forward. “this is getting a little sixth sense.”

the box isn’t anything special, just a plastic container wrapped in a rubber band. sunggyu doesn’t know why he thinks it’s important. up close, the hangeul on the top of the lid is a little bit more legible, but not enough to read what it says; all sunggyu can make out is two nieun bracketing the word. “n-something-something-n,” he says. “great. that gives me a lot to go on.”

inside the box isn’t anything special, either. there are a couple of origami folded cranes and a pressed flower—sunggyu isn’t sure what type, he didn’t pay attention in elementary school when they talked about local flowers. some sheet music, and underneath everything, a journal. oh, sunggyu thinks. that’s why.

the journal doesn’t look very old, so sunggyu thinks it can’t have been there long. it must have belonged to whoever lived here before. the thought makes his skin crawl a little, the hair on the backs of his arms raising as goosebumps. “yeah, seriously sixth sense,” he agrees with himself, turning the journal over in his hands.

suddenly: a sharp sensation on the back of his neck, very much like being watched from across a room.

sunggyu stands up so fast he’s sure he pulled something and spins around to fix his gaze on an empty room. “stop it,” he says, unsure who he’s talking to. “this is getting creepy, and i don’t like creepy.”

the stillness of the room seems to echo with sunggyu’s voice, too loud again.

“i’m talking to an empty house,” sunggyu mutters, shoving the journal in his pocket. “it’s official, dongwoo is rubbing off on me.”

even so, from a couple of meters outside the house sunggyu turns around to look up at the second-story windows. the house is very still, the curtains still too, but somehow that doesn’t comfort sunggyu very much at all.

 

the inscription page of the journal bears the name nam woohyun, much more legibly than had been written on the top of the box. it doesn’t sound familiar to sunggyu, but then again he’s no historian. this is how he finds himself at the library for the second time in a week, searching the databases for the name.

there’s not much on him, either. his family did live in the house sunggyu and myungsu had discovered; they had moved out winter of 2009, two years ago. sunggyu thinks that doesn’t make sense. two years doesn’t seem long enough for the house to be the way it is.

“sungyeol-ah,” sunggyu says on the phone that night. “you’re good at the internet, right?”

“i guess so,” sungyeol says. “hyung, anyone is good at the internet compared to you.”

“i’ll pretend you didn’t say that. can you do me a favor?”

“sure.”

“see what you can find about a kid named nam woohyun. he lived near namgo-san, maybe two or three years ago.”

“namgo-san?” the words are muffled. sunggyu imagines sungyeol talking through a mouthful of whatever he’s eating and winces a little. “is this about that house that you and myungsu went into?”

“he told you about that?” sungyeol’s silence says, duh. “yeah, it’s about that. i think his family were the last people who lived there, but i read at the library that they only moved out two years ago.”

sungyeol clicks his tongue. “i saw the pictures myungsu took. there’s no way that’s only two years of decay.”

“i don’t know,” sunggyu says. “just look it up, okay?”

“fine.”

the first entry in the journal is dated 2007. it’s not very interesting. sunggyu reads through the first few entries in a blaze, mostly because they’re not dense. just the ramblings of a teenage boy, a high schooler, it seems, who plays soccer and likes pretty girls and doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life. sunggyu knows the feeling. it’s not unique.

in autumn of 2008, though, sunggyu slows down. the boy—woohyun, that’s his name, isn’t it?—woohyun starts to write about other things, sadder, more solemn things. things like his parents fighting. his older brother being disowned and sent packing because he dared to drop out from university. “it’s really exhausting, this tension,”, woohyun writes. “mom and dad won’t stop yelling, but i learned a while ago that it’s better not to get involved.” sunggyu knows it makes him sad. it’s a quiet sadness but it pervades every entry, even the happy ones, so much so that sunggyu feels uncomfortable reading.

the last entry is july 23, 2009. it’s short. woohyun wonders if he’ll be able to escape. if he’ll be able to go to college. he wants to, more than anything, but he’s afraid that without him, his family will fall apart.

the amount of sympathy sunggyu feels is startling. the entire experience is a little voyeuristic, he thinks. some of the entries had been startlingly intimate, honest, brutally so. like the one from early 2008 in which nam woohyun talked about kissing a boy in the locker room after practice. well. kissing. other things, too. (that one had made sunggyu put the journal down and go make himself ramyeon for dinner.) or the one from winter of that year when the school jjangs had cornered him behind the science building and beaten him up. they had aimed their punches for his torso, their kicks for his thighs and groin, injuries that he could hide. small kindnesses, woohyun calls them. with the bruises hidden under his clothes, no one would know anything was different.

small kindnesses. sunggyu's word choice is different.

he calls sungyeol again. “did you find anything?”

“some.” sungyeol sounds a little more interested now. it makes sunggyu nervous. “the nam family moved into that house in 2005, or early 2006, somewhere in there. then they moved out again in 2009 after the kid died.”

oh. “which kid?”

“nam woohyun. i don’t know what happened, there’s no records or anything. he just died and then the family moved out a month later.”

sunggyu looks at the table where the journal is sitting. reading someone’s journal is one thing. reading a dead kid’s journal is something else altogether. sunggyu swallows hard. “okay,” he says, wishing his voice didn’t give him away so much. “thanks.”

“hyung, are you okay?” sungyeol asks.

“i’m okay. i just. found his journal, and read it. i thought he was still, you know. alive.”

“that’s creepy, hyung.”

“that he’s dead or that i read it?”

“both.”

 

sunggyu puts the journal and the box down in the center of the room and puts himself down after it. he’s unprepared for a seance, not that he wants to have one. “is this some kind of cry for help thing?” he asks the empty air. there’s no response, of course, and sunggyu feels a little foolish. “am i supposed to have a ouija board or something? will that help?”

a pause.

“i’m sorry i read your journal,” sunggyu says, a little more quietly. maybe he’s foolish for talking to an empty room, but it never hurts to cover your bases.

someone clears his throat. “it’s okay. i wanted you to.”

sunggyu jumps about six thousand miles in the air and chokes back a frightened and terribly un-manly sound. between one blink and the next, a boy has materialized against the far wall. he’s smiling, but he looks a little worried. probably fair; most people who see ghosts don’t react very well. “hi,” he says, sitting very still.

when he remembers how to breathe, sunggyu says, “hi.” his fingers are clenched into very tight fists at his sides; it hurts, but there’s too much adrenaline in his veins for him to do anything about it. “you must be woohyun.”

“i must be,” the boy—wooohyun—replies. “sorry i scared you.”

sunggyu becomes suddenly aware that he’s actually talking to a ghost. or possibly he’s fallen down the rickety stairs in the house and he’s hit his head and he’s having a wizard of oz-style dream. the latter seems, somehow, more probable. woohyun doesn’t look very dead, after all. “it’s okay,” he replies. his voice is very calm, considering how hard his heart is pounding. “not to ask the obvious question but am i dead? or dreaming? or both?”

woohyun smiles a little more. “i don’t think so. you don’t seem very dead to me.”

“how can you tell?”

sunggyu’s not actually sure he wants an answer to that question, but woohyun gives it anyway: “the living have... an aura to them. aura isn’t the right word. it’s just a feeling, like aliveness. the dead don’t have that.”

okay. less scary than he was expecting. “and you’re dead,” he says. “just to clarify.”

“i was the last time i checked.”

“last time i checked, too,” sunggyu says. this is ridiculous. “i’m kim sunggyu.”

“i know.” woohyun straightens his legs out in front of him. “this isn’t the first time you’ve been to my house, remember? i heard your friend say your name. the loud one.”

“myungsu,” sunggyu says. woohyun shrugs. “so—why, though?” this is perhaps a meaningless question, but sunggyu has never really thought of himself as the type to see dead people. sunggyu doesn’t like death. he killed a fish when he was six, trying to give it a vacation on land, and hasn’t allowed himself to have a pet since. he refuses to go into hospitals unless it’s absolutely necessary. he can’t even watch war movies with myungsu because that much death bothers him.

something in woohyun’s eyes flickers. can ghosts get upset? do ghosts even have emotions, or are they just shadows? sunggyu has never paid much attention to horror films. he doesn’t like those either, actually. “i don’t know,” woohyun says. “something about you, i guess.”

“you don’t get to choose who you let read your diary?” sunggyu asks. “is there a mandate about that? some kind of superior ghostly overlord?”

“like god?”

it isn’t the question sunggyu asked, but it is the meaning behind it. “i guess,” sunggyu says with a shrug.

woohyun laughs. the sound is amused, but there’s only hollowness behind it. sunggyu shivers. “there’s no ghostly overlord,” he says. “at least not one i’ve met yet. but obviously i’m doing something wrong, because i’m still here.”

“sorry,” sunggyu apologizes reflexively, “that was insensitive.”

he’s sitting on the floor of a room in an abandoned house having a conversation either with a figment of his imagination or a ghostly occupant, and he’s apologizing for being insensitive. sunggyu thinks his life probably couldn’t get any weirder. he wants to ask how woohyun died, but that would probably be weird immediately after he apologizes for being insensitive, and he figures he’ll find out eventually if woohyun wants him to know.

“don’t worry about it,” woohyun says, smiling again and waving a hand dismissively. “i almost made you pee yourself before, so we can call it even.”

sunggyu looks down, fidgets with the edge of his shirt. “so...” he begins. “what do you want?”

woohyun raises an eyebrow.

“from me, i mean. you let me read your diary, right, and you’re here—or, showing yourself to me, or whatever, you’re doing that for a reason, right? but why? what do you want? i’m really hoping you don’t want to kill me for vengeance or something because that would really not be the right end to my summer—”

woohyun starts laughing again. the sound is fuller this time, less morose. “i’m not the killing type,” he says. “it’s just—” he pauses, thinks. “people come here sometimes, but they usually only look downstairs, and—it’s lonely. it’s really lonely here.”

sunggyu imagines life as a ghost, trapped in a place you can’t escape. he thinks about the nam woohyun he discovered page by page in the diary, the one who liked sports, kissed boys fiercely behind school buildings, who sang in the shower and died too young. he imagines that woohyun living alone in this house, watching it fall apart. thinks about how solitary that life must be. it makes his heart hurt, a little.

“yeah,” he says. “i bet.”

woohyun is looking at him very carefully, like he’s hoping to read something in sunggyu’s face. whatever it is, he must find it. “i just wanted someone to know,” he says. “that’s all. i felt like if someone knew i was here, that it would be less awful.”

“so you just wanted a friend.”

woohyun cracks a smile. “something like that.”

the problem is that sunggyu’s not sure he can do that. “and you picked me because—i was convenient?” he asks. “i came up here when nobody else did?”

“just something about you,” woohyun repeats. “it’s not forever. i just want someone to talk to.”

sunggyu hesitates.

“just stay for a little while,” woohyun says. his eyes are very dark. sunggyu is still a little scared, and he isn’t really equipped to be a counselor for a ghost boy. the back of his neck prickles with adrenaline or something else. but woohyun’s eyes are dark and very pleading. saying no would be like kicking a puppy.

so against his better judgment, sunggyu says, “okay.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (i promised that i would love you forever.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> paradise music video au.

mostly, woohyun wants to know about sunggyu. he asks question after question in rapid fire: what is sunggyu’s sister’s name? does he like sports? when was his first kiss? are his parents still married? how long has he known myungsu? it’s a little like being interrogated, only without the bright lights and good-cop-bad-cop. still, woohyun seems truly interested.

sunggyu answers as best he can, one question after another. it doesn’t take long for him to stop being embarrassed to talk about kissing and girlfriends. woohyun makes him feel familiar.

“what’s with the third degree?” sunggyu eventually asks. they’ve shifted positions: sunggyu is sprawled on his back, careful of wood splinters and broken glass, and woohyun is on his side, head propped up in one hand. it’s so normal. sunggyu doesn’t know what to think. “are you gonna possess me and live my life or something?”

woohyun snorts. “no,” he says. “i don’t think i can possess people. you have to be angry for that.”

“you’re not angry?”

the words come before sunggyu can stop them, and he regrets them immediately. woohyun quiets in every sense of the word. his expression goes still, his body too. “sorry,” sunggyu says. “again.”

“i’m angry,” woohyun says. “about a lot of things. but nothing that possessing anyone would solve.” he pushes himself up, hands grinding against shattered glass on the floor. sunggyu winces, but woohyun doesn’t notice. (ghosts don’t mind things like scraped palms, do they?) “at the end of the day, i’d still be dead.”

the atmosphere in the room has changed. sunggyu can feel it. the air is thicker now, heavier. sunggyu remembers the way the air feels before a storm, wet with incipient moisture and charged with the possibility of lightning. that’s what the room feels like right now. it feels dangerous. “you must remember something good,” he says.

woohyun pauses. “i remember a lot of things,” he agrees. “a lot of good things.”

when he turns around, he’s smiling again. sunggyu feels something in his chest relax in relief. the air is clearer now. “do you want to see?” woohyun asks, reaching out a hand.

“can you do that?”

“i don’t know,” woohyun says. “why don’t we find out together?”

 

it’s not like time-travel, or at least it isn’t like any time-travel that sunggyu has ever imagined. he can still see the peeling walls and the splintering floorboards, water stains on the wallpaper, broken windows. but over that, like an image recalled from memory—from woohyun’s memory—is another scene. a good thing, layered over reality like a double exposure of film.

sunggyu feels the ghost of warmth on his cheek. there’s remembered sunlight streaming in through the closed window in woohyun’s bedroom—it must be late summer, or early autumn. “i was sick,” woohyun says, his fingers cool and dry where they’re closed around sunggyu’s. “staying home from school.”

in their shared memory, sunggyu can see a younger woohyun—sixteen years old, maybe, the same eyes, the same mouth, but softer somehow. this woohyun has less time to learn how cruel the universe can be. he’s lying in bed looking miserable. “a cold?” sunggyu asks.

“the flu. i was home for a week.”

sunggyu hears the echoes of footsteps on the stairs, and woohyun pulls him gently away from the door. not like it matters; memories can’t be changed. “my mom,” woohyun explains. “she stayed home with me during the day.” the tone of his voice is different, somehow. softer. happier.

it’s not anything special, really. a sick son, a concerned mother. she brings memory-woohyun soup and presses a cool cloth to his forehead, hums something soothing under her breath as she brushes woohyun’s hair from his forehead. it’s startlingly tender. sunggyu wonders why woohyun wanted to show him this.

“you miss her,” he says.

woohyun’s grip on his hand loosens, then tightens. “of course i miss her,” he says. “i miss them all. mom, dad, hyung—”

something in the air shifts, and the memory fades. the warmth is gone, and the sunlight. sunggyu and woohyun stand in the center of what used to be woohyun’s bedroom, and sunggyu is still thinking about tenderness, about a mother’s care. “i still don’t understand,” he says, pulling his hand back from woohyun’s.

“understand what?” woohyun pulls back, his eyes dark.

“why me, why that,” sunggyu says. “why are you showing me these things? what do you want me to understand?”

woohyun doesn’t answer. the air is heavy again. in all the ghost hunting shows that sunggyu has ever seen, the investigators have never been able to get straight answers from spirits; why did sunggyu think he would be any different? “i thought you would understand,” woohyun says. he sounds betrayed. sunggyu wonders why that tone hurts so much to hear. “i thought you would care.”

the dark electricity in the air between them makes the hair at the nape of sunggyu’s neck stand on end. “i’m sorry,” sunggyu says. “it’s not that i don’t care.”

woohyun takes a deep breath, and some of the oppressive weight of the air lifts away from sunggyu’s skin. “i know,” he says. “i know.” he smiles, and he has a beautiful smile. sunggyu knows it’s fake. “sorry. i guess the last couple of years have kind of messed with my social skills.”

even as he’s smiling, there is something terrible and empty and desperate in his eyes. it rattles in the hollow places of sunggyu’s bones. “woohyun,” sunggyu says, reaching out to touch woohyun’s cheek (a ghost’s skin, but it’s still skin, that’s surprising, sunggyu didn’t know ghosts had skin). “woohyun,” he says again, and pulls woohyun close. it seems at once like the wrong thing to do and the only thing he can do.

“what?” woohyun doesn’t hug him back. sunggyu wasn’t expecting him to.

“i’m sorry.”

an apology isn’t what sunggyu meant to give, but it seems true now that it’s been given a voice. “don’t be,” woohyun tells the curve of sunggyu’s shoulder. “it’s not your fault.”

but sunggyu learned a long time ago that being at fault and being sorry aren’t the same thing. he wraps his arms around woohyun’s shoulders, his middle, takes him by the shoulders and looks at him. “i’m sorry,” he says again. there’s much more he wants to say, but sunggyu doesn’t remember the words.

“stop apologizing,” woohyun says. he reaches out and touches sunggyu gently at the cheek, then at the edge of his jaw. “just stay with me.”

looking into woohyun’s eyes, all sunggyu can see is an abyss of loneliness. days, months, years, maybe in this room, maybe in other rooms—but sunggyu can see that woohyun has been terribly alone. it hurts something deep in him, like a cold touch to his aorta. “stay with you?” he repeats, just to make sure his voice still works.

“stay with me,” woohyun says. his hands are very cold.

“for how long?”

sunggyu doesn’t need woohyun to say it to know that woohyun means forever.

“i can’t,” he says in a rush. the cold touch to his heart feels like icicles in his veins now, feels like he’s being sliced open from the inside. a bruise on the heart will go unseen, skin and bones shielding the wound. “i can’t stay with you, i don’t even know you—”

“you know me.”

woohyun reaches out and grabs sunggyu’s wrist, his fingers like a vice. they pinch sunggyu’s skin. “you know,” he repeats, and then they’re tripwheeling, spiraling through memory after memory—woohyun’s brother tripping him down the stairs and then shaking with fear when woohyun’s forehead starts bleeding. woohyun’s parents fighting, woohyun himself watching from the top of the stairs. woohyun laughing at a joke told by a slim, big-eyed boy, and later, that same pretty boy pressed against woohyun’s mattress, half-unclothed, gasping. it’s too much. it’s too much.

“i don’t know you,” sunggyu repeats, and jerks his wrist out of woohyun’s grasp. woohyun’s nails leave welts on his wrist.

he runs.

sunggyu makes it as far as the main road before he drops to his knees and vomits behind a bush, and can’t quite meet the eyes of the pretty noona who stops to ask him if he’s all right.

 

“hyung, maybe you should stop letting dongwoo talk you into watching horror movies,” sungyeol suggests, and myungsu frowns at the scratches on his wrist but doesn’t say anything at all. sunggyu privately thinks he might be losing his mind. this isn’t science fiction. ghosts do not exist.

but.

sunggyu wakes up in the middle of the night with a sheen of sweat on his forehead, half-hard, panting. it’s not arousal, just adrenaline, but he still slides a hand under his sheets and touches himself, thinking about lonely dark eyes and pianist’s fingers. this is all so fucked-up. sunggyu comes with a name half-formed on his tongue, and takes a scalding shower to wash away the shame; when he emerges, his skin is pink and raw but he feels just as guilty as ever.

“i’m losing my mind,” he tells his reflection, but his reflection has nothing to say.

 

the house is empty when sunggyu comes back, but sunggyu can tell that it isn’t vacant. it’s too still, the windows too empty, the silence too oppressive. the animal part of sunggyu’s mind tells him to bolt, and the adrenaline is there like his body is about to be in motion—and still he stands on the walkway to the front door and says, “i know you’re watching.”

he breathes, and woohyun is sitting on the steps. “what do you want?” he asks. his voice does not sound kind.

truthfully, sunggyu doesn’t really know.

“you can’t just spring that kind of thing on people,” he says instead of answering the question. “the whole stay with me forever thing. humans are delicate.”

woohyun’s brow furrows. he turns his face into his shoulder, looking away. “i was human once, too,” he says. sunggyu hears the hurt and sadness in his voice, and it feels like being punched in the teeth. “not all that long ago, actually. it must not seem like that anymore.”

“that’s not what i meant.”

“then what did you mean?” woohyun’s eyes are very dark when his gaze meets sunggyu’s again. “why are you here, sunggyu?”

“i don’t know.”

it’s the truth, but it still makes woohyun flinch. sunggyu feels sorry about that. woohyun has been dealt enough hurt in his lifetime to last for several. “i don’t know,” he repeats, “but i think it’s because i know you were human. are human, sort of.”

“sort of.” woohyun snorts indelicately. “you’re either human or you’re not.”

sunggyu takes a step forward, hands clenching at his sides. he can’t figure out why he feels so passionate about this. what is it that’s driving him to behave like this, to be the champion of the downtrodden for this spectre of a boy that he barely even knows? “humanity isn’t about having a body,” sunggyu says. “it’s about. about—love, and hate, and feeling things. you feel a lot of things, woohyun. and it’s about what makes us individuals, instead of all just being like sheep or pigs or something.”

“you’re so eloquent.”

“shut up.” sunggyu thinks that maybe woohyun has lost touch of what made him human, once. maybe the cruel fingers of loneliness and isolation have taken that from him. what sunggyu wouldn’t give to give it back. “i’m being honest here, okay?”

“but you don’t even know me,” woohyun replies, his tone a lilting, sing-song mockery of the words sunggyu had spit in his face only a few days ago. it hurts. sunggyu deserves that.

“i can’t stay with you forever,” sunggyu says. “the best i can do is come by when i’m free and keep you company.”

“free?”

the word sounds like poison when woohyun says it. it almost tastes bitter on sunggyu’s tongue, too. residue. he shouldn’t have said that.

“i used to go to church when i was a kid, you know,” woohyun says. he sounds conversational, casual, but the darkness of his eyes and the whiteness of his knuckles belie the violence of the storm inside him. “you know what they teach you at church about what happens when you die, sunggyu? do you know?”

sunggyu hasn’t been to church since he was twelve, but he knows. “paradise,” he says.

“that’s right. paradise. they tell you that if you’re good, if you’re kind and treat everyone with respect and love god, then you’ll go to paradise.” woohyun’s expression twists, half cruel anger and half deep, deep pain. “is this my paradise?”

“woohyun—”

“is this all there is?” woohyun snaps. “i was a good kid, sunggyu, i went to church and went to school and didn’t even fucking narc on the sunbae who made me blow him behind the athletic supply building.”

sunggyu doesn’t know what to say. he doesn’t know what to say in the face of such crippling anger and fear and betrayal. he’s never felt that before, hopes he never does, and he doesn’t know what the magic words are. he doesn’t know the salve that will heal these wounds. “woohyun,” he says, because that’s all he can say.

woohyun goes quiet. he buries his face against his arm, but sunggyu can see the trembling in his shoulders.

“this is the rest of my existence,” he finally says. “this is everything there is for me. i don’t get paradise, sunggyu. i just get this empty house. that’s it.”

“woohyun, stop it,” sunggyu says, desperate, and takes the few more steps necessary to grab woohyun by the shoulders and hug him, close and not altogether warm (because ghosts don’t have body heat). but it’s contact. sunggyu has never been good at words, but he gives good hugs.

“this isn’t it,” sunggyu says, low and fierce. “you won’t be lonely, woohyun. i promise.”

woohyun takes a deep, shuddering breath—the memory of a deep breath—and wraps his hands around sunggyu’s wrists.”not anymore,” he says.

and then that icy grip closes around his heart, shattered ice in his veins, and sunggyu realizes a little too late.

 

it’s not at all the way sunggyu expects it to be.

when he remembers who he is, the world is nothing like he remembers. it’s cold. it’s very cold, and everything is very grey. the colors of the world are muted. sunggyu feels like he’s breathing in slow motion, and then realizes that he’s not breathing anymore.

“no,” he says, just to test his voice.

what comes out isn’t a voice as much a it is the memory of a voice. he can hear it in his mind, and it echoes in his ears, but there’s no substance. no sound. sunggyu isn’t sure how he knows that no one else can hear him speak.

“no,” he says, scrambling upright. his hands grind into the broken glass on the ground, and the pain doesn’t register. “no, no, what did you do to me—”

“i brought you home,” woohyun says. his voice sounds distant too. a very old recording being played in another room—that’s what it sounds like. “to stay. you can stay here, sunggyu. with me.”

through the window, sunggyu can see the edge of the world where the woods fade into pitch blackness, sticky and thick. tar black. “what is this place?” he asks. it’s a very stupid question. this is woohyun’s world, his playground. someplace between living and death, and sunggyu is trapped. his soul feels anchored to the floorboards in this house, to the walls themselves. he can’t leave.

woohyun comes up behind him, a faint presence behind him. “it’s paradise, sunggyu,” he says, and his fingers are cold on sunggyu’s wrist. “it’s paradise.”


End file.
